All posts tagged ‘periodic table’

I never was any good at chemistry. My dad has a Ph.D. in Chemistry, so I always told my friends and teachers that I felt fluency in a subject matter must always skip a generation. And in my case, it didn’t just skip… it leaped and then did a somersault backflip. I just didn’t get it. Atomic numbers, electron dot models, balancing equations… argh. I really did try. Honest. My college buddies will confirm that when I got my B in Chemistry I (with a generous cutting of slack by the professor), they actually heard my whoops of joy ring out on the campus. And I don’t even remember Chemistry II… I believe that my brain has blocked that entire experience. I don’t remember my grade, who taught the class, what we learned, or how I even passed.

This difficulty with chemistry has followed me my entire life. My dad left retirement (as a Senior Chemist) and went back to the workforce when asked by a local junior college if he’d like to teach part-time. I’ve received a number of college-level chemistry textbooks over the last few years from him as he attempted to find a way to reach out to his chemistry-challenged son. I even cracked a couple and tried to go over them again. A fog of war descended once again, and I’d finish a chapter wondering what I’d just read. Continue Reading “It’s a Wonderful Life With the Elements” »

Inhaling helium as a science trick is very much 1980s; what you really need to do is try inhaling an inert gas with a little more density, as they did on Rough Science recently.

Rough Science is a momentary and randomly produced vodcast from Australian science educator Sean M. Elliott. He is all kinds of fun and mayhem for students, but has that great knack of being a good mix of geek dad humor and renegade science type (watch him go to town on the periodic table in the above episode).

The episode above is the most recent: Sean explains very simply the difference between inhaling different inert gases and why that changes the sound of our voice. Check out what happens when you inhale xenon.

We’ve written about Theodore Gray before. A co-founder of Wolfram Research, and all-around cool science guy, Gray brought us one of the best early apps on the iPad, The Elements, and features all sorts of science goodness on his website. In this video, he shows off his periodic table table, and his amazing (and perhaps somewhat startling) collection of elemental samples, including some exotic ones you may have never seen (or even heard of) before.

Congratulations to Briac Pilpré, who correctly solved this week’s puzzle and won a $50 gift certificate to ThinkGeek.

Puzzle:

OK. I made it back from Comic-Con weary and only somewhat alive, but entranced with all the glorious things I saw there. But now that I’m chained back to my desk at Puzzle Central, I can’t stop day dreaming about Walking Dead trailers and Mythbuster panels. I was so distracted this week, I couldn’t come up with a puzzle, but I did find a scrap of paper in a drawer with a bunch of numbers on it. What’s the answer?

10.811 24.305 10.811 26.982 10.811 28.086 40.078

1.0079 39.948 54.938 26.982 54.938 9.0122 10.811

1.0079 39.948 12.011 39.948 18.998 10.811 28.086

9.0122

Solution:

You probably thought those numbers looked pretty familiar — and then you realized they were atomic weights. If you then pulled out your wallet-sized periodic table, you could convert the numbers to elements. But what does Boron, Magnesium, Boron, Aluminum, Boron, Silicon, Calcium, Hydrogen, Argon, Manganese mean? Is it some new compound? Actually, if you take the atomic number of each of these elements and convert it to the alphabet (Hydrogen, atomic number 1 = A; Helium, atomic number 2 = B, etc.) you will find that the answer is:

“Elementary, my dear friend.”

In case you didn’t figure out that the numbers were atomic weights, there was a hint – the puzzle title includes some lyrics from the song “Elements” by the wonderfully sublime band, Lemon Jelly. (And the image is the cover art to the CD “Elements” appears on, Lost Horizons.)

Come back Monday for a new puzzle from Dave Giancaspro. I’m curious to see what he’s come up with. The noises coming from his cubicle are absolutely horrifying.

“I really don’t know how to describe it other than to say you have to see it to believe it… If you checked out a magical version of The Elements from the Hogwarts library, this would be it.”

This was how Theodore Gray describes his application, The Elements: A Visual Exploration for the iPad. I had the opportunity to review the application over the weekend with some science-y friends of mine. All were in agreement: if books like this were around when we were in school, it would have been a lot more fun to learn the periodic table.

Thanks to the wonders of twitter and twitpic, and a Brisbane-based tech/entrepreneur guy called Jono Haysom who tweets at @JonoH I present to you – The Periodic Table of Elements in the form of deliciously iced baked goods!